PRISTINE ANARCHY

People like President Reagan because--they say--he made America feel good about itself. That’s a nice proposition until you think of the possibility of Americans running around feeling good about themselves when, in reality, things are terrible.

This powdery mantle of cosmetic optimism draped itself over the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial, that venerable survey of American art that seems to take perverse pride in acting as a lightning rod for more critical ire, indignation and raillery than any phenomenon since Freud announced that little boys lust after their mothers.

Every other year the museum displays work by a large number of artists it regards as significant. Nobody ever quite figures out what it adds up to. The event itself has sloshed about from being a national newcomers’ intro, to surveying current trends, to concentrating on artists living around New York the way it does this time. Works by 75 painters, sculptors and film and video makers are most often represented by more than one work each. They range in age and renown from venerable icons like Willem de Kooning and Louise Bourgeoise to cultural comets like Julian Schnabel and twinkly starlets of the so-called Neo-Geo abstraction revival like Phillip Taaffe and Peter Halley.

In past years the biennial was skewered as a kind of art-world pickup bar, trendy debutantes’ ball, a curatorial smoke-filled room politically promoting the reputations of favored artists and just a gigantic bore.

This edition has achieved a perfected state of pristine anarchy. Selected by Whitney curators Richard Armstrong, Richard Marshall, Lisa Phillips and John Hanhart it makes not one iota of sense.

Except it is cheerful, pretty and full of well-built work. The tone is set by Judy Pfaff’s wall-filling installation. It evokes a mechanical world somewhere between a carnival going full tilt and a chorus of kimonoed Japanese dancers twirling paper umbrellas.

There is not an idea in it. It is a massage parlor of sensations. If the curators set out to select a smiling, conservative, pleasurable and noncommittal show for reasons of their own they also mumbled into the Zeitgeist that is abroad in the land, Post-Mod pandemonium, a cosmic vacuum sucking artists willy-nilly into conformity with a new set of unwritten rules.

Unwritten but clear in practice.

Thou Shalt Be Charming While Appearing Intransigent.

Barbara Kruger’s slogan-posters look like social criticism but they are mainly entertainment for the Big Chill set. A hand holds a card reading, “I Shop Therefore I Am.” Making fun of yuppies making fun of themselves is a game for smart-set conformists who don’t want to own up to their membership in the group.

Thou Shalt Not Have Ideas.

Jeff Koons is a charmer. His “Rabbit” sculpture looks like a bunny made of silver mylar balloons. It is actually cast chrome stainless steel. It probably is the satire on American consumerism they say it is, but Lord knows that’s a harmless theme. Really it is a very deft exercise in physical illusionism. Something that looks weightless is really very heavy. He pursues similar ends in “One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank.” A basketball floats dead center in a tank of water. Wait. That contradicts the laws of physics. It’s done with weights. Very entertaining.

Thou Shalt Not Have Feelings.

How can you make art without feelings? Feelings are woven into every aspect of a work.

You can escape feeling in art if you position yourself outside your own work. Julian Schnabel shows a huge brown canvas bearing a white cloth pendant with the word virtue spelled in gold letters. It shows absolutely intelligent understanding of how to express conscience in visual terms but it does not participate in itself. It jibes at the serious painting of the German Anselm Keifer, turning him into a television evangelist. It’s a high point in artistic bitchiness.

Stepping aside from one’s own work translates into irony. A long list of artists in this show subsist on content that is little more than the posturing of callow youth expressing its stylishness, nonchalance and unfocused rebelliousness. There has never been anything but irony in the work of Richard Prince. It’s all immature world-weariness. Finding the old video-master Nam June Paik making Neo-Ex robots out of vintage, nostalgia-laden radio and TV cabinets make you feel a little let down.

Thou Shalt Be Entertaining.

The art world grows evermore public, it’s as simple as that. As it beams itself at a bigger audience, it has to communicate through wavelengths that are at once noncommittal and exciting like “Miami Vice.” Historically, that brings us back to the Baroque. Its loudspeakers were an integration of architecture, design, painting and sculpture broadcasting the virtues of social conformity through exciting sensations.

There’s a lot of that at the biennial.

Izhar Patkin draped a whole room with sheet rubber and painted a flickering mural on it. The image is hard to read but comes across like some Jay Gatsby fantasy of the esoteric insights to be gained through luxurious indulgence.

Sculpture by Robert Loeb are domesticated earthworks that use special-effects techniques to sculpt Moby Dick chimeras, part dinosaur and part boulder. R. M. Fischer’s metal thingamajigs look like set dressing from a old Buck Rogers Saturday serials.

The biennial feels like it blundered into a semblance of significance.

Despite its perverse selections, the biennial does include works that ring of seriousness--and not all of them are from masters like John Chamberlain or Sol Lewitt who need this exposure like the Sahara needs sand.

There’s a timeless solidity about Robert Helms’ art. First shown in Los Angeles, this Washington state artist has left off making craft-fetish boxes and now paints cosmic coffins and pit bulls. It is eerie stuff, but it makes a lot of the rest look like a Broadway musical. So do the strange mural-size photos of the Starn twins that include a life-size homage to Hans Holbein’s “Dead Christ.”

Donald Sultan and George Condo are frank Abstract Expressionist revivalists who also capture some of the committed spirit of the old style. Ditto for Terry Winters, Jim Lutes and Roberto Juarez working in the shade of late Philip Guston.

The biennial does not escape problems that have plagued “Art Now” sorts of shows since old, defunct community surveys from Long Beach to Atlantic City. One of the worst irritations is that you have to think about at least twice as many names as there are artists in the show because every lesser-known artist is imitating a better-known artist. Sometimes the most significant artist in a show is not even in it. That’s the artist with the most imitators.

If anything, this problem is worse today because of the fashion for “appropriation”--shameless plagiarism of past art. David Bates is the biennial’s Marsden Hartley, Robert Greene its Louis Elshemius. Bruce Weber is a slightly scruffier Robert Maplethorpe.

Theme-and-variation does not produce automatic failure, especially when a sensibility is translated to another medium. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s videotape “Kappa” is an incest-theme melodrama that sends up TV soaps, has a life of its own and casts light on the painting of Eric Fischl.

There are not a lot of California artists on hand--Lari Pittman, Bill Viola and a few others--but one is present both in his own work and in an influence of startling pervasiveness. Ed Ruscha shows some surprising new images--sooty gray silhouettes of modest houses and a wagon train headed west. There are blank white strips in the images underlining the absence of those words which have dominated Ruscha’s work for a decade. Yet the extension of his sensibility into other artists shown amounts to a revelation. Neil Jenney’s “Atmosphere” is a Victorian-ecologist Ruscha. Annette Lemieux’s “Curious Child” is a virtual Ruscha appropriation, as are Nancy Dwyer’s “Coming Up Next” and “Your Name.”

Ruscha used to be criticized for meandering away from painting into book and film-making. Now his dead-pan literalism and use of Pop imagery has soaked as deeply into the fabric of present art as that of Andy Warhol and at the moment appears more fruitfully flexible.

Visiting California boosters experience little twitches of satisfaction upon being reminded that the winds of inspiration do not blow exclusively from east to west.